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Family & Social Life

Donations to the Museum have preserved irreplaceable evidence about generations of ordinary Americans. Objects from the Copp household of Stonington, Connecticut, include many items used by a single family from 1740 to 1850. Other donations have brought treasured family artifacts from jewelry to prom gowns. These gifts and many others are all part of the Museum's family and social life collections.

Children's books and Sunday school lessons, tea sets and family portraits also mark the connections between members of a family and between families and the larger society. Prints, advertisements, and artifacts offer nostalgic or idealized images of family life and society in times past. And the collections include a few modern conveniences that have had profound effects on American families and social life, such as televisions, video games, and personal computers.

Although the vacuum cleaner had been invented in the early 20th century, the mass production and sales of vacuum cleaners did not take off until the economic boom that followed the decade after the First World War (1914-1918). This Hoover vacuum model 700 was produced between 1926 and 1929 and was the first of its kind to feature an aluminum body, an on/off switch, and the agitator brushroll—an innovation that used metal beater strips to vibrate pieces of dirt from carpets. The vacuum was one of the many supposedly labor saving devices marketed in the 1920s that promised to liberate middle-class women, now managing their houses without live-in maids, from the drudgery of housework. Accordingly advertisements for the Hoover 700 depicted a chic flapper of the late 1920s using the vacuum. Although the vacuum did clean more thoroughly than the broom and dustpan, the popularization of such appliances created more exacting standards of cleanliness thus making the hope of simplified housework largely illusory.